Part 6: The new family tree

Natalie Stechyson, Postmedia News10.30.2013

Expecting gay couple Simon Hebert, right, and husband John Fetto, left, open gifts from friends during their baby shower at the restaurant Le Pourvoyeur in Montreal on Saturday, January 26, 2013.Dario Ayala

Expecting gay couple John Fetto, left, and husband Simon Hebert, second from left, open gifts from friends as Hebert’s sister-in-law Pascale Desroches, right, looks on with her children during the couple’s baby shower in Montreal in January.Dario Ayala

Some family trees have branches that grow in diverse directions, binding people together in ways that go far beyond the traditional notions of mother, father and child.

Across Canada, these types of non-traditional families are becoming more and more common.

In Victoria, B.C., seven-year-old Athena Lynngood knows that her “Funkle Jefferson” is also her donor, that a donor is not the same thing as a dad, and that when he visits the two of them are going to knit a hat for her brother.

In Montreal, baby Liam is far too young to comprehend that his fathers needed the help of an anonymous egg donor and a surrogate in the United States in order to have him, but Simon Hebert and John Fetto plan to explain it all to their son as soon as he’s old enough to understand.

And in Toronto, all that Clare Evered-Armet knows about her anonymous sperm donor, and all she wants to know, is that he’s musical, he loves animals, and that he’s very tall. For a young girl who dreams of rescuing animals, who sings and plays piano, and is already pushing five feet at just 10 years old, these are sufficient details about the man with whom she shares her DNA.

“I think that’s all I really need to know, because it’s not like I’m going to get to know him or see him any time soon,” Clare says.

Almost one in 10 same-sex couples have a child at home, according to census data from Statistics Canada. Of this, 80.3 per cent of those families were female same-sex couples and 19.7 per cent were male same-sex couples.

While many LGBTQ people choose to adopt, and others have children from previous relationships, a large and growing proportion are seeking out assisted reproduction such as insemination with donor semen or surrogacy to have children.

This type of family-building has resulted in unique permutations and arrangements. Often gay men and women wanting to help each other out will agree to be each other’s donors. Sometimes, a lesbian couple will take turns becoming pregnant using the same donor sperm so that each of them can experience carrying a child.

In some cases, a donor stays in the child’s life – often as an “uncle” (or a “funkle”) or as a family friend who occasionally comes to visit – and in other cases a couple chooses anonymity.

And sometimes a family configuration emerges that no one, not even the parents, expected.

Jackie Armet and Mary Evered met on a canoe trip, fell in love, and soon decided they wanted a child. Using anonymous donor semen from ReproMed – the only national sperm bank in Canada – Armet, a cheese monger, underwent three rounds of intrauterine insemination and became pregnant with Clare.

“We felt very strongly that we would be all the family that was needed,” Evered, a high school music teacher, says of their decision to use anonymous semen.

“We didn’t want any complications.”

But there was one.

On the other side of the country, in Vancouver, Armet and Evered’s best friends were also starting their family. The two lesbian couples became pregnant around the same time.

They both shared details about their anonymous sperm donors with their mutual friends. And both couples described a very tall man with light eyes. Eventually the two couples realized they had both become pregnant using the same donor.

That’s not all that surprising considering there is only one sperm bank still operating in Canada that sells sperm coast to coast. And that bank usually only has between 30 and 50 active donors at any one time.

Clare and her sister were born six days and five provinces apart.

“The girls both full-fledge call each other sisters. No half sisters. None of that. The girls both say ‘I have a sister and we’re six days apart’,” Armet says.

The girls send each other cards and small gifts, and talk via Skype on the computer. The families make an effort to see each other every year. The Vancouver family went to visit Toronto in late August, and Clare had excitedly planned activities – such as making chocolate fondue – for her and her sister.

“Sometimes it gets lonely being an only child, but then I think no – I have a sister,” Clare says.

The result of using anonymous donor sperm for the two families is both perfect, and imperfect. The girls have sisters they wouldn’t have had otherwise, but they’re separated by the length of a country. A loving, extended family has been created, but at the heart of its creation is a semen shortage that disproportionately affects lesbians.

All that matters to Armet and Evered is that they have a happy, healthy, beautiful child.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to me, other than meeting Mary,” Armet says.

***

While some experts believe that LGBTQ people should not have children, citing the wellbeing of the children, many others argue that the opportunity to have a child – one of our most fundamental biological urges – should not be denied based on sexual orientation.

There is no law stating that having a child is a basic human right. But the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which regulates assisted reproductive technologies in Canada, clearly states that people must not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. And lawyers and judges will often cite the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – that everyone is equal under and before the law – when making arguments and decisions regarding LGBTQ parentage.

And the fact that having children is a very deliberate, planned and often costly choice for LGBTQ people shows how dedicated they are to being parents, they argue.

“These are people who have to put a tremendous amount of thought into becoming a parent,” says Calgary-based fertility lawyer Ellen Embury.

For instance, for a gay couple pursuing surrogacy, they will have to secure a donor egg, find a surrogate, go through cycles of IVF, sign legal donor agreements and file parentage declarations or apply for a second-parent adoption.

And when these men finally get their babies – when they have their first swaddling lesson in the hospital, when they take their child home – the love and excitement is like nothing else she’s seen, Embury says.

Recently, Embury visited a gay client whose baby had been born just three weeks earlier. Already, the man had taken the tiny bundle to check out every preschool and elementary school in the neighbourhood. He was overcome with excitement about her going to school someday.

“I’m not suggesting that others are not great parents, but my practise is men and women who cannot have children without some assistance. That’s a really unique subset. Those are people who are just amazing parents, dedicated parents, in my experience,” Embury says.

The debate over LGBTQ parenting comes down to whether one believes the desires of the intended parents should be the priority with regard to reproductive technology, or whether the focus should be on the children, says Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montreal.

And Somerville is staunchly on the side of the children.

“I’m not saying it because I want to hurt same-sex couples or homosexual people, or even single women. I’m saying it because in the clash of claims between a child and the adults, I believe ethically we should give priority to what’s best for the child,” Somerville says.

A child has a right to a mother and a father, and to know his or her genetic origins, Somerville says. It’s unethical to create “genetic orphans,” she says, especially when it comes to knowing one’s family history for genetic diseases such as cancer.

“It’s a terrible thing for us as a society to be complicit in doing that. To say yes, we will deliberately create genetic orphans,” she says.

Even when a donor remains in the child’s life, their concept of parenthood becomes fragmented between multiple people, Somerville says.

“They don’t know how to put it all together. Who is their parent?” she says.

***

In Victoria, “Funkle Jefferson” is visiting.

Jefferson Packer, 39, lives in San Francisco. But this weekend he’s come up to visit his friends Melora and Shana Lynngood and to spend some time with the children the three of them created.

Packer is the Lynngoods’ sperm donor. The married Unitarian ministers used his sperm to impregnate Melora with Athena, who is now seven years old, and to impregnate Shana with one-year-old Demetrius.

Although the three adults signed an agreement that Packer wouldn’t have any parental rights, he stays in Athena and Demetrius’ lives in the role of an uncle - someone who cares about the children and the family, but isn’t a part of their day to day lives.

When the Lynngoods were looking for a sperm donor several years ago, Packer was drawn to the idea of helping his friends start a family, he explains. As a gay man, he knows the difficulties LGBTQ people face in order to have children.

So he went with his gut and trusted that he could handle the decision. So far, their arrangement has worked beautifully, he says.

“I’m a Funkle. That’s a term I came up with. Because there’s always going to be something funky about this uncle,” Packer says with a chuckle.

He tries to visit once per year.

Demetrius is still too young to understand, but Athena has known for years that her Funkle is her sperm donor. It’s part of the narrative of her family. Right from when she was three years old, Athena would put on skits re-enacting her mothers’ wedding and the phone call Melora made to ask Packer if he would donate. The little girl would even mimic covering the phone with her hand to shout ‘he said yes!’

As far as Melora knows, Athena hasn’t had to face any discrimination, she says. Victoria is a very accepting place, their church congregation has welcomed their family with open arms, and there’s another little boy in Athena’s class who has two moms.

“We explained to her from the very beginning, that in order to make a baby, you need an egg and sperm. Mommy and Mama had the eggs, but we needed sperm. Funkle Jefferson gave us the sperm,” Melora says.

“But we never used the word ‘Dad’. Because in this culture, Dad means more than a genetic contributor.”

In Montreal, baby Liam lives with two dads, but he was created with the help of an anonymous egg donor and a surrogate from Pennsylvania.

While they have no way of knowing who their egg donor is, John Fetto and Simon Hebert have developed a close relationship with the woman they met through an agency who carried their child

They spoke with the woman, who asked not be identified, every week when she was pregnant. When the men went to Pennsylvania two weeks before the woman’s due date – just in case – they spent most of their time with her, going to her daughter’s basketball tournament, and eating dinner at the family table.

The men stood beside their surrogate as she was in labour, Hebert holding a fan to help keep her cool as she struggled to push out their 10 lb 4 oz son without an epidural – her idea. And as soon as Liam was born, the woman insisted that Fetto and Hebert, who were concerned about the woman’s health after the intensive labour, leave her side and go be with their child.

The two men then took turns holding their newborn son, first Hebert and then Fetto, resting Liam skin-to-skin on their bare chests. The new family of three came back to Canada a few weeks later.

There’s no doubt that they bonded with their surrogate throughout the pregnancy, Fetto says, but the geographic distance has helped make it easier to separate themselves now that Liam has arrived.

Still, they will maintain a relationship with the woman, Hebert says. They will keep her updated on Liam’s development and they already have a few visits planned. When Liam is old enough, they’ll explain to him who the woman is and the role she played in his creation.

“There’s no hiding that neither of us could have given birth to him. He’ll always know who she is and what an important part she played,” Fetto says.

“We’re all tied together forever.”

***

Studies have consistently shown that children raised by LGBTQ parents turn out just as well as those raised by heterosexual parents.

In May, the American Academy of Pediatrics released an extensive study that reviewed 30 years of research on children of gay or lesbian parents. That research provides “robust, reliable and valid assurance about the well-being of children raised by parents of the same gender,” the authors wrote. That research demonstrates that children and adolescents who grow up with gay or lesbian parents fare as well emotionally, cognitively, socially and sexually as do children of heterosexual parents. The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, which released its first set of preliminary results this summer, collected data on 500 children across Australia. Children age 5-17 with “same-sex attracted parents” had significantly better scores on measures of general health and family cohesion compared to other Australian children, the study found. There were no differences on any other measures including self-esteem and emotional behaviour.

And the U.S.’s National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which was designed to document the development of the first generation of lesbian families with children conceived with donor insemination, has been tracking a cohort of planned lesbian families since the 1980s. One of their many recent studies found no difference in the quality of life of the adolescents born to lesbian mothers compared with a matched sample born to hetero families; another found that the absence of male role models didn’t adversely affect the psychological adjustment of children of lesbian mothers.

Another of the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study reports, from 2010, found no difference in the development of psychological wellbeing of lesbian-reared children conceived using known versus unknown donors.

A recent Canadian study, however, found that children of LGBTQ parents don’t always have an easy time at school.

Egale Canada Human Rights Trust surveyed more than 3,700 students across Canada and found that more than a third of youth with LGBTQ parents reported being verbally harassed about their parents’ sexual orientation, and 27 per cent reported being physically harassed. Those youth were also more likely to be harassed about their own gender expression, and their own perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Just over 60 per cent of students with LGBTQ parents reported that they feel unsafe at school. The youth will avoid disclosing that their parents are LGBTQ in order to protect themselves, the study found.

“I am not out about my family because people are so stupid that they think if you know someone who is LGBTQ then that means you are too,” one student wrote in the results.

But Clare says her experiences with other children in Toronto have been quite positive. People don’t treat her any differently when she tells them she has two moms, she says. And she’s happy to explain to others how her family works.

“Pretty much all the time they’ll say ‘but what about your dad?’ But I just tell them that I have a donor, not a dad. So they usually say ‘so then the donor is your dad?’,” Clare says.

“But then I explain to them that he’s not my dad, he’s just a donor. So then they usually get it after that.”

Her family isn’t any different from a “normal family,” she says. She and Armet, whom she calls Mommy, and Evered, whom she calls Mama, go on bike rides, play card games and spend summers at the cottage. They play music together – Clare either singing or playing piano, Armet on the ukulele and Evered the music teacher playing any number of instruments.

“Moms are really understanding. They’re always caring. Not that a Dad isn’t but, ya, moms are really fun to be with and I’m happy having two of them,” she says.

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